I have been a long term shareholder as well as a long term mobile phone subscriber of Singtel. The experience had not been great, to say the least, especially in the past three years. Singtel's stock had done okay if we look back in time. It was $2.2 or so in 2007 and today it's $3.7. An investor who held throughout would had made 68% on capital gain and another 40% or so in dividends. But in the last three years, it did nothing. Meanwhile, DBS went from $15 to $25 and became the largest stock in Singapore (overtaking Singtel) for the first time ever!

Today, we try to decipher what happened to the #1 stock in Singapore.

Singtel's investment thesis had been pretty simple. This was a business connecting 600 million mobile subscribers over a huge part of the world. It generated tremendously strong free cash flow ...